Cambridge teacher chained naked pupil to radiator with a dog collar

Cambridge County Council are accused of failing to protect the girl after a social worker flagged up concerns.

The alleged abuse took place at Sir Harry Smith Community CollegeWiki Commons

A Cambridge teacher forced a 15-year-old pupil to wear a dog collar and chained her naked to a radiator during a period of frequent and sustained abuse in the 1990s.

The teacher sexually abused the girl almost daily in a store cupboard at the end of the school day over a period of three years, according to the BBC.

It is alleged that the local council failed to pass on warnings about the teacher flagged-up by a concerned social worker to Sir Harry Smith Community College, Peterborough, where the abuse took place.

He would later rise to the rank of deputy headmaster at a London school but has now been banned from teaching.

The victim, referred to as 'Abigail', told the BBC: "The abuse happened four, five times a week - and it would be in the classroom store cupboard."

"On several occasions he tied me to a radiator with a dog collar and told me not to move, and made me sit there naked," she said, adding that the attacks took place after other teachers had gone home.

Abigail's abuser is also reported to have taken her to his home during the three years of horror which began when she was 15.

"To do that he would get me to jump in the back of the car, sit behind the seats and be covered up by a blanket - so that when he got to his house, nobody would see me go in," she said.

The teacher cannot be named for legal reasons but the BBC claim to have seen documents that show a social worker wrote to Cambridgeshire County Council — his employer — in the 1980s warning them about his behaviour with other vulnerable girls.

The BBC believes that this information was never passed on to management at Sir Harry Smith Community College before they hired him.

Cambridgeshire County Council agreed to pay Abigail, now a woman, an out-of-court settlement of £550,000.

The victim said she had been so traumatised by the abuse that she had been unable to have children because she could not have sex with her husband.

A spokesman for the council told the BBC: "It is deeply regrettable that these incidents happened in the 1990s, and we offer our sympathy to the victim.

"However, the school itself and the whole vetting and checking process is very different from the systems in place 25 years ago."

The Department for Education told the BBC: "all public bodies and organisations working with children should have a clear child protection policy which spells out how to raise concerns with local authority children's social care services, the NSPCC, and the police."